“Yes, God be blessed, but for many other reasons,” she murmured dully.

He turned to look at her, astonished. “What’s wrong?”

“Yaakov, I don’t want these clients! And…” She finally had to say it, what had been secretly going through her mind for months now. There was no choice. “I can’t go back there … to Boro Park. I just can’t.”

What she had loved about becoming an Orthodox Jew was the valiant optimism of the attempt to cast out all that was base and ugly in human nature and behavior. Only the true God who created mankind would have the audacity and optimism not only to believe it possible but to provide a pathway. And it was not just the big things—murder, kidnapping, adultery, theft—it was the exquisite exactitude of the little things: You must not go into a shop and ask the price of something if you had no intention of buying; it was considered fraud, because it wasted the time of the poor shopgirl or store owner; you must have scrupulously accurate weights if you sold things by weight; you mustn’t look at a beautiful home with envy in your heart, even if you didn’t know who it belonged to, because envy might lead to coercion, and then to theft, and finally to murder. And even if the envy never led anywhere, but simply settled in your heart, that, too, was forbidden; you mustn’t take revenge, even if it was only in the form of refusing your neighbor a cup of sugar because they had denied you a cup of milk; you mustn’t gossip, tell tales, humiliate someone even in private. And if you did it publicly, causing the blood to rush into a person’s face, it was akin to murder; you mustn’t put a stumbling block in front of the blind or curse a deaf man; you must give back lost items, and guard lost property until the owner could be found, expecting nothing in return; you must love your neighbor as yourself. You must do nothing to him that was hateful to yourself …

The laws went on and on, laws created for Jews, by Jews, over thousands of years that in their strict observance would make a human being little less than an angel and would create a nation of the most kindly, honest, decent human beings who had ever walked the face of the good earth. She had wanted to live among such people in the hope that it would help her to become one as well.

She thought of Boro Park. In her short time there, she had met such people. There were, perhaps, even many of them. But they were like that not because of that place but in spite of it.